Sally Nyolo

"I like wearing clothes which fuse elements of different cultures. I'm not just "Africa" today, you see, I'm a world melting-pot! It takes me an hour to get ready for each performance. I like to take the time to do my make-up and choose which materials I'm going to wear on stage. The way I see it, music's not just about sound, it's also about stories, paintings, perfumes and colours. You don't just listen to music - you breathe it, you taste it and you enjoy it visually! When I'm on stage I love constructing a décor for my songs which helps transport the audience into another world."

"Personally speaking, yes. I performed my first tour of Cameroon and that was an absolutely extraordinary experience. I actually got to reach out and touch my Cameroonian fans. It had been a personal dream of mine for a long time you know, as a singer who comes from Africa to go back there and play bikutsi, my native music"

"The thing is I'd always felt very drawn to my roots. In fact, I've always felt this real homesickness for my country and my native language, Eton. When I was growing up I made my mother speak to me in Eton all the time - that way, over the years, I haven't lost touch with the music of my mother tongue. All the time I was singing backing vocals for other artists, I'd be singing and writing material for myself too. I'd write my songs in French, English and Eton. Then one day I was going through my material and I realised that most of the stuff I'd written was in Eton. This material formed the basis for my first demo tapes which later got worked into my debut album "Tribu". Around the same period I was already getting interested in bikutsi - that's a type of music from central and southern Cameroon which nobody was playing in Paris back in those days."

"I'm currently in the studio working on a new album. But I'm in Cameroon to fight against child marriage. I've been a UNICEF ambassador since 2016, and since then, I've been very active in Cameroon to fight against child marriage, to meet with artists, and above all, to carry out a major undertaking: the production of a musical, in order to reach out to the public through institutions."

"Unfortunately, it's not an African scene... The most important scene for me was the scene where I played with Maceo Parker , James Brown and there were more than 70,000 people in front of us. They bought all my CDs and at the end of the concert, they took off their t-shirts and asked me to sign on their bodies with permanent markers. The scene happened in Denmark. Another unforgettable memory was in Belgium when I saw children paint their hands blue and they made a line from the stage to the dressing room to wait for me. While I sang in Eton, in Fang, in our languages, these children shook their hands to tell me that I had given them the opportunity to think that there are no colors among humans. Culture has no color, it's the vibration that we give to the other that counts."

"I don't know how to answer because I don't know the artists who are being boycotted, because we don't operate in the same environment. I don't know those who are boycotting them either. I've never been boycotted, anyway ."